It's official: Variety reports that Elijah Wood will play Iggy Pop in an upcoming biopic called "The Passenger," to be directed by Nick Gomez. As they say in the funny papers, "Aiieeee!"

This may, in fact, turn out to be a good movie. More likely it's the first sign of the apocalypse. I like Wood, and I understand his desire to break out of the box that childhood adorability and "The Lord of the Rings" put him in. He's been trying to get this movie off the ground for two years, so obviously he's committed. And yet, and yet, and yet -- you're gonna have to prove it to me, Frodo.

And it's not going to be easy: Wood has the most soulful eyes in the business, and the former James Newell Osterberg -- leader of The Stooges, primogenitor of punk, and perhaps the most gleefully unhinged of rock's bad boys -- arguably has no soul. Unlike Jim Morrison or Ray Charles or any other rock great whose life has been poured into a Hollywood container, there's no psychological backstory (that we know of, anyway), no demons, no artistic mission, nothing to "explain" why the Ig felt it necessary to cut his chest with broken bottles in concert back in the late 60s and pour every bit of unholy midwestern voodoo he could muster into songs like "TV Eye". He simply is. The average rock movie is often about the perils of ego, but how do you make one about a guy who's all id? And how do you convince us Elijah Wood is that guy?

On another front, this marks the point where the wave of rock biopics finally starts to wash over the punk generation. Thirty years ago it was "The Buddy Holly Story," fifteen years ago "The Doors," now this. When Katie Holmes gets cast as Patti Smith, please kill me.

I'd love to give you the on-the-ground Cannes report, but Wesley and I are stuck here reading blogs like everyone else. Maybe next year. Still, the only festival in the world that could get away with letting Jerry Seinfeld float overhead dressed as a giant bee (promoting his upcoming kid's movie "Bee Movie") is worth keeping tabs on. Personally, I triangulate between Variety's Anne Thompson, Premiere's Glenn Kenny (to whom thanks for the Seinfeld photo above), and Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeffrey Wells, currently engaging in impassioned knockabout on the merits of "My Blueberry Nights," Wong Kar-wei's first English-language film. Wells hates it, Thompson loves it, and Glenn, bless his cross-referencing little heart, is "the Derek Smalls of this debate -- the lukewarm water to Thompson's fire and Wells' ice." Without seeing the movie -- as if that's stopped me before -- I will note the legions of great filmmakers who have crashed on the Scylla and Charybdis of English dialogue and name stars. (Bergman? "The Serpent's Egg." Truffaut? "Fahrenheit 451." There are plenty more, but the only one who turned it to his advantage while biting the hand that wrote the checks was Godard with "Contempt.")

Other Cannes blogs: Time's Richard Corliss, A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis at the Times (warning: video podcasts), the folks at IFC, the excellent GreenCine Daily, Cinematical, and the U.K.'s Guardian (they hate "My Blueberry Nights" too). There are plenty more out there, from pishers and panjandrums alike. If you find one you like, send me the link and I'll post it.